Doom 3 was released in August 2004 by id Software and published by Activision. It is not a sequel but a complete reinterpretation of the first Doom: we are on Mars in 2145, inside the Union Aerospace Corporation facilities, where teleportation experiments tear open a rift to Hell. The marine you play walks through the overrun base, corridor after corridor, to stop the invasion from reaching Earth.
The change of tone is radical. Where Doom and Quake were about running forward, Doom 3 slows everything down, turns off the lights and goes for horror: enemies bursting out of dark closets, audio logs to listen to, and a flashlight you had to put away in order to shoot — the players' famous "duct tape mod" was born from that, and the 2012 BFG Edition eventually built a light into the armour. The game ends in a confrontation with the Cyberdemon, and the Resurrection of Evil expansion followed in 2005.
Its real signature is technical: id Tech 4 is the first John Carmack engine to unify real-time lighting and shadows, with stencil shadow volumes that give the game its permanent chiaroscuro look. In 2004 you needed a high-end machine to run it. The source code was released under the GPL in November 2011, giving birth to dhewm3, a modern port of the engine based on SDL and OpenAL — that is what Recalbox uses, in the shape of the boom3 libretro core.
| Studio | id Software |
| Publisher | Activision |
| Year of release | 2004 |
| Engine | id Tech 4, replayed by dhewm3 (boom3 core) |
| Game type | FPS, horror |
| Port licence | GPL-3.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
Recalbox provides the engine, not the game. Doom 3 is a commercial title: its data is not shipped and must come from a copy that you own.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro boom3 | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ |
Doom 3 is only available on PC (x86_64). The core is not built for any other board: not RPi3/RPi Zero 2, not RPi4/400, not RPi5/500, not OGA/OGS/RG351, not RG353. The system does not appear on those machines. For id Software shooters on a Raspberry Pi, see Doom, Quake and Quake 2.
Libretro boom3 is the only emulator for this system. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. This core declares no CRT output support.
Place your files in:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Doom 3/
Supported extension: .pk4 — also read from a .zip or .7z archive
Recalbox ships no game data at all: the folder only contains an empty base/default.cfg configuration file. There is no downloadable demo for this system either — unlike Quake 3, the system menu offers no download entry. Everything must come from your own copy of the game.
Copy the base folder from your Doom 3 installation — the one holding pak000.pk4 through pak008.pk4. For the Resurrection of Evil expansion, add the d3xp folder next to it.
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Doom 3/
├── base/
│ ├── pak000.pk4
│ ├── …
│ └── pak008.pk4
└── d3xp/ ← Resurrection of Evil (optional)
├── pak000.pk4
└── pak001.pk4
The .pk4 files then show up in the game list; launching one starts the engine, which takes the parent Doom 3/ folder as its data directory and looks for base/ and d3xp/ inside it. That is why the .pk4 files must be kept inside a subfolder, and not dropped loose at the root.
The editions sold on Steam or GOG work fine, as do the original CDs/DVDs. The 2012 BFG Edition, however, uses reworked data that dhewm3 cannot read.